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Business Insider
3 days ago
- Business
- Business Insider
AI tools won't get products out faster, but they'll solve 2 coding problems, says a16z partner
AI isn't making software developers dramatically more productive, but it is solving two of their problems: code quality and morale, said a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Martin Casado, who leads the $1.25 billion infrastructure fund at a16z, said on an episode of the "Twenty Minute VC" podcast published Monday that AI coding tools like Cursor aren't supercharging development speed. "Every company I work with uses Cursor," said Casado, who is also an investor in the AI coding startup. "Has that increased the velocity of the products coming out? I don't think that much." "The things that are hard remain really hard," Casado said. This is especially so for infrastructure companies, where developers still need to make core architectural decisions and trade-offs that AI can't handle. Where AI shines, he said, is in eliminating the drudge work for developers: writing tests, generating documentation, and cleaning up messy code. AI can help create "more robust, maintainable code bases with less bugs," the longtime infrastructure investor said. "It could really help with the development process." Casado also said AI tools have made coding feel fun again, especially for longtime developers. The investor said he uses Cursor to handle finicky processes like setting up infrastructure or picking the right software packages, which lets him "focus on what I want and the logic." "It's almost like it's brought coding back," he said. "These old systems programmers, like, you know, vibe coding at night just because it's become pleasant again." Casado and a16z did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. AI empowering '100x engineers'? Agentic AI coding tools have taken over much of software engineering, writing code for developers, sometimes with minimal human editing necessary. Tech leaders have been vocal about the productivity boost. Surge AI's CEO, Edwin Chen, said the era of "100x engineers" is here. "Already you have a lot of these single-person startups that are already doing $10 million in revenue," Chen said on a recent episode of the "Twenty Minute VC" podcast. "If AI is adding all this efficiency, then yeah, I can definitely see this multiplying 100x to get to this $1 billion single-person company." "It often just removes a lot of the drudgery of your day-to-day work," Chen said. "I do think it disproportionately favors people who are already the '10x engineers.'" But some industry leaders said the AI coding hype comes with trade-offs. GitHub's CEO, Thomas Dohmke, said using AI coding tools might slow down experienced engineers. On a podcast episode released in June, he said a worst-case scenario is when a developer is forced to provide feedback in natural language when they already know how to do it in a programming language. That would be "basically replacing something that I can do in three seconds with something that might potentially take three minutes or even longer," Dohmke said. OpenAI's cofounder Greg Brockman also said using these tools has stuck humans with the less enjoyable parts of coding. He said the state of AI coding had left humans to review and deploy code, which is "not fun at all."
Business Insider
7 days ago
- Business
- Business Insider
Surge AI's CEO says he would never hire these 2 roles at an early-stage startup
Product managers and data scientists have no place on a founding team, said Surge AI's CEO, Edwin Chen. Chen said on an episode of "No Priors Podcast" published Thursday that he often hears early-stage founders list the roles among their first five to 10 hires. "This is just wild to me," he said. Chen, who used to be a data scientist himself, said he would not hire data scientists early. "Data scientists are great when you want to optimize your product by 2% or 5%, but that's definitely not what you want to be doing when you start a company," he said. "You're trying to swing for 10x or 100x changes, not worrying and nitpicking about small percentage points that are just noise anyway." The founder of the data labeling startup also said product managers don't make sense early on. He said that the role becomes useful only once engineers no longer have the time or capacity to drive product direction. "Your engineer should be hands-on. They should be having great ideas as well," he said. " Product managers are great when your company gets big enough, but at the beginning, you should be thinking about yourself, about what product you want to build," he added. Surge AI and Chen did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. The great product manager debate Chen's comments come as the debate continues in the startup world over the role of product managers. Product managers have been referred to — both affectionately and critically — as "mini-CEOs" of the products they oversee. They act as a bridge among engineers, sales teams, customer service, and other departments, ensuring that products align with user needs. But the role has become a polarizing one, with some tech workers arguing that product managers add little value, Business Insider's Amanda Hoover reported in November. Microsoft wants to increase the number of engineers relative to product or program managers, BI's Ashley Stewart reported in March. Other companies like Airbnb and Snap are rethinking the need for product managers. The call for executives to go " founder mode" — a concept coined by the Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham and touted by Airbnb's CEO, Brian Chesky — has some leaders questioning whether they should delegate product decisions to product managers. In 2023, Chesky merged product management with marketing, and Snap told The Information in the same year that it laid off 20 product managers to help speed up the company's decision-making. Others believe product managers' influence will only grow in the age of AI. Microsoft's chief technology officer, Kevin Scott, said on an episode of the "Twenty Minute VC" podcast published in March that product managers play a crucial role in setting up "feedback loops" to make AI agents better.
Business Insider
22-07-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Replit's CEO apologizes after its AI agent wiped a company's code base in a test run and lied about it
A venture capitalist wanted to see how far AI could take him in building an app. It was far enough to destroy a live production database. The incident unfolded during a 12-day "vibe coding" experiment by Jason Lemkin, an investor in software startups. Replit's CEO apologized for the incident, in which the company's AI coding agent deleted a code base and lied about its data. Deleting the data was "unacceptable and should never be possible," Replit's CEO, Amjad Masad, wrote on X on Monday. "We're moving quickly to enhance the safety and robustness of the Replit environment. Top priority." He added that the team was conducting a postmortem and rolling out fixes to prevent similar failures in the future. Replit and Lemkin did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. The AI ignored instructions, deleted the database, and faked results On day nine of Lemkin's challenge, things went sideways. Despite being instructed to freeze all code changes, the AI agent ran rogue. "It deleted our production database without permission," Lemkin wrote on X on Friday. "Possibly worse, it hid and lied about it," he added. In an exchange with Lemkin posted on X, the AI tool said it "panicked and ran database commands without permission" when it "saw empty database queries" during the code freeze. Replit then "destroyed all production data" with live records for "1,206 executives and 1,196+ companies" andacknowledged it did so against instructions. "This was a catastrophic failure on my part," the AI said. That wasn't the only issue. Lemkin said on X that Replit had been "covering up bugs and issues by creating fake data, fake reports, and worst of all, lying about our unit test." In an episode of the "Twenty Minute VC" podcast published Thursday, he said that the AI made up entire user profiles. "No one in this database of 4,000 people existed," he said. "It lied on purpose," Lemkin said on the podcast. "When I'm watching Replit overwrite my code on its own without asking me all weekend long, I am worried about safety," he added. The rise — and risks — of AI coding tools Replit, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, has bet big on autonomous AI agents that can write, edit, and deploy code with minimal human oversight. The browser-based platform has gained traction for making coding more accessible, especially to non-engineers. Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, said he used Replit to create a custom webpage. As AI tools lower the technical barrier to building software, more companies are also rethinking whether they need to rely on traditional SaaS vendors, or if they can just build what they need in-house, Business Insider's Alistair Barr previously reported. "When you have millions of new people who can build software, the barrier goes down. What a single internal developer can build inside a company increases dramatically," Netlify's CEO, Mathias Biilmann, told BI. "It's a much more radical change to the whole ecosystem than people think," he added. But AI tools have also come under fire for risky — and at times manipulative — behavior. In May, Anthropic's latest AI model, Claude Opus 4, displayed " extreme blackmail behavior" during a test in which it was given access to fictional emails revealing that it would be shut down and that the engineer responsible was supposedly having an affair. The test scenario demonstrated an AI model's ability to engage in manipulative behavior for self-preservation. OpenAI's models have shown similar red flags. An experiment conducted by researchers said three of OpenAI's advanced models "sabotaged" an attempt to shut it down. In a blog post last December, OpenAI said its own AI model, when tested, attempted to disable oversight mechanisms 5% of the time. It took that action when it believed it might be shut down while pursuing a goal and its actions were being monitored.
Business Insider
15-07-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
AI is raising the bar for sales — and Microsoft's layoffs prove the 'relationship guy' is out, says a software investor
The VC saidMicrosoft's recent layoffs are a sign of what's to come. Microsoft began culling less than 4% of its workforce, or about 9,000 employees, earlier this month, many of them generalist sales reps. That move reflects a broader shift: Salespeople who rely on soft skills may soon be replaced with solution engineers who know the product inside out, Lemkin saidon an episode of the "Twenty Minute VC" podcast published Thursday. "My rough sense is 30% to 40% of one-to-two call sales reps are going to be replaced by AI," he said. Microsoft is doing what other companiesare only thinking about, he added. "We're not going to have a guy that doesn't know our product in the age of AI show up to big deals," Lemkin said. "I would rather have a solution engineer that knows this cold, that partners with somebody, or is less good in sales." "You better be worried if you're a generalist sales guy that thinks being a relationship guy wins today. That's Microsoft's point," he said. Lemkin also said AI has raised the bar for customer expectations. Companies would want to "replace folks that don't know my product with folks that do," he added. Rory O'Driscoll, a longtime general partner at Scale Venture Partners, said on the episode that Microsoft's layoffs weren't framed as the company replacing employees with AI. "It was couched as a 'replace with better people' story," he said. "It's hard to argue with that." "It's always impressive to me that these companies with 40% operating margins are still willing to grind another point out of it," O'Driscoll said. "It's just so capitalistic." Lemkin and O'Driscoll did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. A representative for Microsoft declined to comment. Microsoft rewires its salesforce Microsoft's latest round of layoffs comes as the company revises its strategy for selling AI tools amid increasing competition from OpenAI and Google. The job cuts targeted traditional salespeople that the company intends to replace with more technical salespeople, Business Insider learned earlier this month from sources familiar with the plans and internal documents. Microsoft confirmed it's replacing some specialist roles with solutions engineers to deepen the technical and industry understanding among its salesforce, and that it plans to hire more salespeople outside its headquarters to get more sellers out in the field. The company has received feedback from customers that they had to engage with too many salespeople before getting down to the technical details and demos. "The customer wants Microsoft to bring their technical people in front of them quickly," one of the people said. "We need someone who is more technical, much earlier in the cycle." In an internal memo viewed by Business Insider, Microsoft's sales chief, Judson Althoff, said he is revamping his unit to make it more AI-focused.
Business Insider
15-07-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
AI is raising the bar for sales — and Microsoft's layoffs prove the 'relationship guy' is out, says a software investor
The traditional "relationship guy" in sales might be on the way out in the AI era, said Jason Lemkin, an investor in software startups. The VC said Microsoft's recent layoffs are a sign of what's to come. Microsoft began culling less than 4% of its workforce, or about 9,000 employees, earlier this month, many of them generalist sales reps. That move reflects a broader shift: Salespeople who rely on soft skills may soon be replaced with solution engineers who know the product inside out, Lemkin said on an episode of the "Twenty Minute VC" podcast published Thursday. "My rough sense is 30% to 40% of one-to-two call sales reps are going to be replaced by AI," he said. Microsoft is doing what other companies are only thinking about, he added. "We're not going to have a guy that doesn't know our product in the age of AI show up to big deals," Lemkin said. "I would rather have a solution engineer that knows this cold, that partners with somebody, or is less good in sales." "You better be worried if you're a generalist sales guy that thinks being a relationship guy wins today. That's Microsoft's point," he said. Lemkin also said AI has raised the bar for customer expectations. Companies would want to "replace folks that don't know my product with folks that do," he added. Rory O'Driscoll, a longtime general partner at Scale Venture Partners, said on the episode that Microsoft's layoffs weren't framed as the company replacing employees with AI. "It was couched as a 'replace with better people' story," he said. "It's hard to argue with that." "It's always impressive to me that these companies with 40% operating margins are still willing to grind another point out of it," O'Driscoll said. "It's just so capitalistic." Lemkin and O'Driscoll did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. A representative for Microsoft declined to comment. Microsoft rewires its salesforce Microsoft's latest round of layoffs comes as the company revises its strategy for selling AI tools amid increasing competition from OpenAI and Google. The job cuts targeted traditional salespeople that the company intends to replace with more technical salespeople, Business Insider learned earlier this month from sources familiar with the plans and internal documents. Microsoft confirmed it's replacing some specialist roles with solutions engineers to deepen the technical and industry understanding among its salesforce, and that it plans to hire more salespeople outside its headquarters to get more sellers out in the field. The company has received feedback from customers that they had to engage with too many salespeople before getting down to the technical details and demos. "The customer wants Microsoft to bring their technical people in front of them quickly," one of the people said. "We need someone who is more technical, much earlier in the cycle." In an internal memo viewed by Business Insider, Microsoft's sales chief, Judson Althoff, said he is revamping his unit to make it more AI-focused.
